A beautifully rendered narrative and characterization portrays the soul of a country few Westerners truly understand.
A fluid, sympathetic journalistic foray into the tumultuous history of Somalia as lived by an intriguing impresario and activist.
Riven over the decades by clan divisions, famine, military coups, dictatorship, and terror by the jihadi group Al-Shabaab, Somalia has seen much of its population displaced and traumatized and only now returning to some peace and stability. In his engaging biography of one unlikely local hero, Mohamud “Tarzan” Nur, Johannesburg-based journalist Harding follows the fortunes of one family of exiles who have returned to the war-scarred capital of Mogadishu to stick it out and reclaim their city from a horrible legacy of civil war. With elegant descriptions, Harding brings this East African coastal country to vivid life, depicting a sun-drenched “pearl of the Indian Ocean” made up of tall, slender nomads whom he found “impossibly, jaw-droppingly resilient” in the face of decades of hardship and violence. The author hones in on Nur, who was born to a poor mother, fatherless, raised in an orphanage, found some outlet as a youth in basketball, and was educated largely by his wits. His outspokenness and the Somalian war with Ethiopia over the neighboring Ogaden region prompted him first to seek employment in Saudi Arabia. His bride, Shamis, followed for love, and the couple had six children, whom Shamis mostly raised by herself after seeking asylum in London without her husband. The family eventually returned to their homeland in 2010 when the Al-Shabaab terrorist group finally left the city. Courageously—or foolishly, as Harding suggests—Nur accepted the dangerous job of mayor and proceeded to try to infuse the destroyed city with his jaunty brand of optimism. While corruption still prevails, Harding reveals enormous goodwill in the beleaguered people who have returned to rebuild their beloved country.
A beautifully rendered narrative and characterization portrays the soul of a country few Westerners truly understand.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07234-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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